


A Circle of Water

by disenchanted



Series: Henry, Henry [2]
Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2 - Shakespeare
Genre: 'I'm Dr. Rockso the rock and roll clown - I do cocaine!', ('seriously dude a lot of cocaine'), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Aristocracy, Class Issues, Drug Abuse, Dysfunctional Family, London, M/M, circadian plot structure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 22:07:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10545136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Lord Lancaster holds a party, but attends only half of it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, it is I, disenchanted, here to bring you more Henry/Hal content you never asked for. This is a sequel to [But Not the Sense of Spring](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8791810), but it can work, I think, as a standalone. The working summary to this was 'Hal has come here to snort cocaine and fuck his father, and he's all out of cocaine,' but it doesn't quite work because he never actually runs out of cocaine. Many thanks to M. for talking me through this thing.

It was just about to be the new year. The Christmas season was now nothing more than last week’s party: Hal, rather than go up to Monmouth to spend the holiday with his family, had stayed in London and passed the twenty-fourth to twenty-sixth at the Boar’s Head, where Ned had come to escape his Jewish family’s rather bizarre interpretation of the Christian event, and where Jack habitually was. On the twenty-seventh he returned to the offices of Woodstock Energy Solutions, having, the past summer, been given the position of Assistant Digital Strategist. So far the job, from which he drew a salary of seventeen thousand pounds, generally entailed sitting in front of his laptop with Twitter open in one tab and porn in another, and going out for lunch at the Itsu on Berkeley Square. The thirtieth arrived, the eve of New Year’s Eve, and besides the job Hal had nothing to show for himself but a slightly worse coke habit than he’d had the year before.

‘The only thing I regret about this year,’ said Jack that evening, ‘is that that Dutch boy never messaged me again. For legs, there’s no one like the Dutch. My resolution for the new year, coincidentally, is to go to Amsterdam.’

‘What do you care about years?’ said Hal. ‘You wouldn’t know a year if someone rolled up a calendar and stuffed it up your arse.’

Jack said, ‘You offering, love?’ and ordered another round, which he subsequently discovered he hadn’t enough to pay for. Hal considered giving up and getting into heroin.

By the time Hal made his way round to the townhouse in Mayfair he was drunker than he had intended. He had meant to drink just as much as would give him the courage to see his family, but the courage never seemed to materialise: what brought him to the house was merely gravity.

His father was throwing a party. There was a man at the door taking coats, hats and gloves; beyond him the corridors were clogged with the overspill from the drawing room, from which emanated a peculiar mixture of American jazz and Home County drawl. Hal, in his knitted jumper and moccasins, was underdressed, and drew sidelong glances until he was recognised, whereupon he was greeted with ambivalent deference. The only guest who seemed at all pleased to see him was the elderly Countess of Wharton, who made up for her delicate stature by wearing an oversized silver lamé suit jacket and an ankle-length patterned frock. Seeing him from across the room, she shoved through several much taller party-goers, then took a conspicuous stumble that pitched her right into Hal’s chest. Aware of his role in this scenario, he steadied her with a firm hand to the shoulder.

‘My dear boy,’ said Lady Wharton, ‘I haven’t seen you since the summer of ‘83, when you gave that tremendous party with the flamingoes. I felt sure someone told me you had had an illness and passed away.’

‘Oh yes, but I’m back from the dead,’ said Hal.

‘I can’t imagine Lord Lancaster will be happy.’

‘But I just couldn’t keep myself away, I had to come see you, darling,’ said Hal, and leant down to give Lady Wharton three wet kisses, one on each cheek and one on the lips, after which he wiped her lipstick from his mouth with the sleeve of his jumper and told her he’d be back in a mo’, he’d only got to say hello to someone else.

Following a waiter with an empty tray back to the kitchen, Hal found Tom and John at the little round breakfast table sharing a packet of prawn crisps with a wide-eyed reverence rarely afforded to that item. Upon Hal’s approach they looked at each other as if to confirm that what they saw was, after all, material reality.

‘Fuck,’ said Tom, spraying crisps down his shirtfront, ‘when did Hal get here?’

‘Dad said you told him you weren’t coming,’ John slurred.

‘I tell Dad a lot of things,’ said Hal. This was meant in the sense that a lot of the things he told their father were lies; but the actual number of things Hal told Henry was very small, and dropping faster than the value of the post-referendum pound. They hadn’t seen each other in person since an awkward lunch at Henry’s club in mid-November. ‘D’you know where he is?’

‘Um, gosh, I don’t know, haven’t seen him in ages,’ said Tom.

‘It’s just,’ John struggled to say, ‘we’re a bit high.’ And he began to laugh, Hal assumed at the absurdity of their mutual understanding that they could only face their father if they were out of their skulls.

Sticking his hand in the packet of crisps, Hal said, ‘Yeah. Right. So do you want to come and do a line with me?’

 

* * *

 

Rather than risk being caught in the loo down the corridor from the drawing room, they retreated to the bathroom on the second storey, which, when the siblings stayed at the house, they had all got to share; the vanity was crowded with the things that had been left there, Blanche’s face masks and Philippa’s scented candles, the shaving creams and the electric razors, the pots of D.R. Harris lip balm, Hal’s Blenheim Bouquet, the beard oil Humphrey had used during his brief attempt at the Mumford & Sons look…. While Hal cut lines on the toilet seat cover Tom sat on the floor and rolled a spliff; John opened the window and looked down into the garden below. Cold air blew in, forcing Hal to stop for a moment to shield his coke from the breeze.

‘Why,’ croaked Tom, letting go of the first hit of the spliff and passing it to John, ‘do I never see you, Hal, except when we’re taking drugs together?’

‘Because he never sees anybody unless he’s taking drugs with them,’ said John.

Hal said, ‘Not true, I do drink with people.’

‘What, like the fat chap?’ asked John. ‘He’s not really people.’

‘It’s just that you’re all such bloody bores, I try to keep out of your way.’

‘Don’t,’ said Tom. ‘I mean, I try to keep out of _his_ way, but all Dad ever does is text me like, “Oh my God, Tom, where’s Harry, wah wah, he hasn’t answered my texts in a week, I think he’s dead, I think he’s run his car into the Thames and drowned, I think he’s gone on a crack binge and got himself stabbed, please won’t you ring Harry and tell him to ring me, I know you’re at work but I’m dy—ing.” And then I’m like, “Dad, literally, Hal never talks to me, how should I know where he is?” And then he’s like, “You’re hiding something from me, you know where he is and you’re not telling me because you want to protect him,” and then I’m like, “Well, fuck, I don’t know, have you tried that pub he’s at _literally_ every day, it’s not like he’s in Madagascar?” —Give it, John, you’ve already smoked like half.’

Hal, massaging his sinuses, said, ‘Sorry our father’s got a mood disorder, but I can’t be blamed for that, can I? Genetics work the other way round.’

‘You haven’t _helped_ ,’ said John, and leant to blow smoke out of the window.

‘Line, John?’ Hal offered.

‘No thanks, I’m actually not that desperate.’

‘Okay, Hotspur,’ said Hal. Emboldened by Tom’s dull, nasally laughter, he put on his Hotspur voice. ‘ _Um, atchy I don’t_ do _coke? Like, I don’t know if you know, but the illegal drug trade is atchy a leading cause of human rights abuses? Yah, I wuh-wrote a thing about it for the Guardian—wuh-well, yah, it was Comment is Free, but after I did that mural-painting project in Honduras I felt like it was my obligation to bring the struggles of the less-privileged to light?_ … Christ, what a knob.’

The coke dripped down the back of Hal’s throat; euphoria came bright as a spotlight, clearing away the slurring and sleepiness of his drunk. Tom and John were so stoned they had forgotten they were meant to be insulting him: he alone knew what had been said, what had not, what would never; and what was done.

Sitting on the tiled floor, leaning back against the edge of the bathtub, he looked up at the place where the wallpaper was peeling away from the crown moulding and thought of Francis Bacon, who understood the worth of knowledge but who stumbled perpetually at the heels of the rash, impetuous, dazzling, beautiful Essex: until the end, when Essex’s head rolled. Through the floor Hal felt the tumbling vibrations of a Krupa drum solo. _Weilala leia, wallala leialala_ ….

 

* * *

 

The party, presumably, was taking place because Henry had some obscure and baffling political aim: the guests were almost all peers who had taken their seat in the Lords, or those peers’ spouses, or their children. However none but the most crashing bores were talking politics; if anyone accepted an invitation from Lord Lancaster it was to make use of the family’s extensive cellars, which were not even really Henry’s but his more refined forefathers’. When Hal returned to the drawing room he saw that everyone was madly drunk in the way one can only be at the end of the year, believing that in a day or two all one’s sins will be quite forgotten. He was aware of feeling a rare generosity towards his father’s guests, and humanity more broadly. So they were all bores and knobs and embarrassments: how could one not be, living? For one couldn’t just live, one had got to live among others, and it was through touch and shared breath that corruption spread.

Directly a suitably lively song began Hal scooped up the nearest woman and said, without bothering to look at her ring finger, ‘Surely your husband won’t mind if we dance?’

As it turned out the woman was the Baroness C., who had been born into a minor branch of the Norwegian royal family and married an Indian-English magnate of something or other just a year after he had been created the first Baron C. She had the Scandinavian sense of informality and humour, and her dancing wasn’t bad; with a little wink she slipped her hand down the small of Hal’s back. This was the sort of woman who would innocently ask Henry, ‘Has your eldest met someone yet? It’s a shame he isn’t dating.’ To which Henry would say, ‘I haven’t any idea about his private life.’

Hal’s next partner was a rather tall man who in polite company was referred to as the ‘secretary’ of the Earl M., son and heir of the hundred-and-one-year-old Marquess of S. Now that peers were not technically disallowed from marrying someone of the same sex Lord M. and the much handsomer Mr B. might have admitted to the nature of their relationship, but they were both so old-fashioned that they felt more secure with an almost-respectable excuse. Mr B. was drunk enough that he had not been able to refuse Hal his dance, but his ambivalence showed in his stifled movements. It made Hal laugh, fully and charmingly, tossing his head back to bare his knobbled neck.

‘Why not dance,’ said Hal, leading Mr B. in a spin, ‘you’ll be looked at anyway, you’re one of the handsomer people in the room.’

Mr B.’s smile was guarded. He must have thought that Hal was one of those hearty straight boys who liked sometimes to look a little queer for the hell of it. His hand, however, did the same as Baroness C.’s and dropped to the small of Hal’s back, resting on the sagging waistband of his trousers, against the upper swell of his arse.

Over Mr B.’s shoulder, Hal saw the four or five old men who had been standing talking in the doorway look over their shoulders and then bemusedly stumble backwards, clearing a sliver of space for someone to get through. It was Henry who was entering, slipping in sideways like a waiter, looking at his feet. Hal glimpsed for a second the man his father was when he himself was not there: exhausted beyond reason, half-existing, perpetually shrouded in his own burdensome physicality. Then Henry looked up and saw Hal, and was simply stricken. Hal, looking away, finished his dance with Mr B., who groped his arse every time his back was not in view of any of the other guests.

In the minute and a half between Henry entering and Hal breaking away, Henry had become involved in a conversation with one of the bores who actually wanted to talk politics. As Hal took a Kir Royale from a passing waiter, he saw that Henry was beckoning Hal over with a crook of the index finger.

‘Ah! Lord Derby,’ said Henry’s conversational partner, who at length Hal identified as the MP for some irrelevant Midlands county, ‘how d’you do, I’ve heard you’re working for Lord Gloucester now, down at the Woodstock offices? —Or was that one of your brothers?’

‘Yeah, yeah, um, that _is_ my brother Tom actually—sorry!—but don’t be embarrassed, there are a lot of us to keep track of...I do hope you’ve been well, Mr—? Um—?’

Henry said, ‘I was just telling Mr D— that now would be a fine time to open the ‘92 Dom Perignon.’

Here was a touch of the old Henry, the man he had been when he himself was Lord Derby: blunt perhaps, but enterprising, effective. The MP would not have been satisfied merely by the standard Veuve Clicquot the waiters were distributing, he would have taken umbrage at the implication that he might be at all impressed by having been invited to a party by the Duke of Lancaster, who everyone knew was mad and dull; but now it seemed he had been granted a personal favour, probably foretelling of others. The covetous little bastard’s eyes were all of a sudden alight.

‘You don’t want to save it for the party tomorrow night?’ said Hal, just to see the MP squirm with the effort of pretending not to mind one way or the other. There was not, of course, a party tomorrow night; Henry liked to double up on his barbiturates to ensure he would sleep through the turning of the year.

‘I think not,’ said Henry, ‘I think it shall be tonight. Why don’t you run down to the cellar, Harry, and fetch it?’

 

* * *

 

Once the barred oak door that led to the basement was closed behind Hal, the noise of the party went dead. With his back to the door he stared down the stone steps and waited for his vision to adjust to the light cast by the single bare bulb hung over the landing. Then he had a cigarette, watching the smoke cloud in the still, damp air.

Rarely did Hal feel such certainty about what he would do, and what would be done to him. At school he had always scoffed at the classical insistence on fate and foresight; it seemed obvious to him that the Greeks’ belief in an essentially logical universe was as much a product of flawed mortal thought as hubris was. But he could not see, now, how anything could happen but what would happen. And Tiresias has foresuffered all, enacted on that same divan or bed…. Hal crushed out his cigarette and descended.

The basement had not been substantially updated since before Victoria died: the granite foundation walls remained uncovered, soft and green with mould, glistening here and there where water dripped. The wine cellar had been sealed dry, protected from London’s water table; when Hal entered he stirred up the dust that clung to the bottles, stacked one on top of another on wooden shelves. He remained still, facing the bare wall between two rows of shelves, until the dust began to settle again. Presently there were footsteps.

‘Turn around,’ said Henry, and when Hal did he saw that his father was just before him. Fiercely Henry struck Hal with the back of his hand.

‘Was that for staying away,’ said Hal, ‘or coming back?’

It had been so long since they had talked Hal had begun to forget the particular quality of Henry’s voice, the chest-deep rumble that upon hitting the mouth was adulterated by a sort of post-stroke slur. Henry was saying, ‘Why do you think you’ve the right to come and go, and to expect that when you return you’ll have retained all the privileges you haven’t earned? It’s the fashion to be common, I understand; but then you must be common. You aren’t a mutt, you have not been bred ambiguous.

‘But I have wanted you here,’ Henry went on. ‘If I had liked to make you go I should have done.’

That was the trouble: Hal was sick of being wanted. At the Boar’s Head no one gave a damn about him, they especially did not give a damn about his soul. His father did, his father wanted him to absolve himself, thereby absolving him in turn. Henry feared death and felt that if Hal was holy enough he, Henry, would not have to suffer. Frankly Hal felt he should not have to be responsible for saving his father from damnation.

What, then, was this regret? It was the kind that put the past and future all out of joint, so that the past was closed to him and the future was a precipitous fall backwards. He kept thinking, _If only I had_ , but he couldn’t say what he ought to have done. He was forgetting his own thoughts as soon as he thought them.

Plaintively, in the way children speak when they ask their parents for something they know they will not get, Hal said, ‘I don’t want to stop being one thing and then the other. Then I would have to be something, rather.’

‘You bloody well are something,’ said Henry.

‘Oh God, but I know. I’m reminded every time someone calls me Lord fucking Derby.’

‘They don’t call you that at the Boar’s Head.’

‘They _do_ , it’s just more of an insult coming from them than it is from the photographer from Tatler.’

‘Richard never liked the way I talked to common people...he said all they want is a snob really, to show them they hadn’t power even when they were righteous. Of course I didn’t take his meaning until after he was dead.’

‘Yes, I know this one: Richard could have been brilliant if he hadn’t been a narcissist, or a bugger, but at some point in the nineties he threw you over in favor of Bushy, Bagot and Green, and it got him nothing but an early death, and now I’m doing just what he did, which is another thing you can blame him for. I’d feel sorrier if it were true but it isn’t, I’m not like Richard at all, I’m not even like Mummy was, I’m _your_ son.’

For all his irreverence Hal knew precisely what was wanted of him. That was why he could do such a fine impression of his father: he had lived his whole life as both object and instrument of Henry’s desires. Yet however well Hal could pretend to be Henry he could not be him; neither could Henry, shedding his own sin and his own guilt, be Hal. Their relationship was that of continuation, not reincarnation: they were like the sort of creature that, once split, became two separate creatures. The splitting had happened when Hal was born, but for twenty-two years now Henry had been wondering why he could not move half of his own body; and however many mirrors Hal held up Henry did not see the lack.

From the corridor came an intentionally conspicuous shuffling. After that failed to draw anyone out there was a hesitant ‘Ehm, hello? Lord Lancaster?’

The MP’s round, pinkish face emerged from the dark. His ruddy smile contorted into a caricature of itself once he realised he had made some sort of faux pas. Hal thought of the time he made an ‘Eton mess’ joke to the Duke of Edinburgh; it wasn’t the double entendre that was a mistake, it was just that really the only people who found Eton jokes funny were people who had been at Eton, and the D. of E. had gone to some obscure place in Scotland.

‘Oh,’ said the MP. ‘I had just thought….’

Henry, stiffly attempting a benign smile of the sort Richard used to give when he was trying to trick people into thinking he was not being cruel, did the MP the disservice of allowing him to try to explain himself without at any point mentioning the champagne.

Cutting him off, Hal said, ‘Yes, well— Actually, Dad, Lady C— I think was a bit eager to see you, and I doubt she’ll stay very late, so why don’t you go back up and I’ll give Mr, ah— I’ll give him the tour of the dust collection?’

The coke was wearing off, and Hal was sinking farther and farther from the surface of himself. Physically he was irritated, aching, a little sick from drinking; emotionally he was nothing, he could not remember how he felt when he did feel. The tips of his fingers were numb. Guiding the MP forward, he put his hand gently on the man’s back, brushing the cloth of his jacket. The MP glanced over his shoulder as if he could not guess who was touching him unless he looked.

 

* * *

 

The party had got its second wind by the time Hal reemerged with the ‘92 Dom, the appearance of which enlivened things further. Hal, having little interest in any drink that was not beer or spirits, went to look for Tom and John and found them in John’s bedroom playing FIFA ‘17. Rather than drag his brothers back into the bathroom he did a couple of key bumps and went downstairs again, where at once he was set upon by Lady Wharton.

‘Harry,’ she said, opening her arms. ‘I do think you might have said hello, rather than forcing me to fling myself upon you.’

‘Ah. Have I been very negligent?’ said Hal, kissing her just as he had done before. ‘I’m not really here, to tell you the truth; I just dropped in to have a word with my father and found myself at a party.’

‘I quite understand, you’re young enough you’ve better parties to attend than this. I don’t mean to disparage your father when he means so well, but one misses the sort of party Richard Bordeaux gave. The homosexuals were much more charming then. What year was it…it must have been ‘83.’

‘Yes, my father told me….’

‘Not everything,’ said Lady Wharton, smiling mystically. ‘Well, my dear, kiss me again before you go.’

Go where? wondered Hal, passing through rooms of faces he had seen before and did not care to see again. To a different party? The Boar’s Head would be closed by now, Poins would be somewhere in North London with whoever he hung out with when he wasn’t with Hal, Jack would be at his grubby flat finishing the six-pack he’d bought at the off-licence on the way back from the pub. That, in Lady Wharton’s words, was another world. Hal had come knowing he would sleep here, come down here, and when he felt himself again, take a cab back to his flat in Fulham, where he would go on doing whatever it was that he did when he was alone.

Lady C., he saw, was sitting on a sofa underneath an eighteenth-century horse painting, eating little sausage-roll canapes and doing something on her iPhone. Hal leant against the arm of the sofa and, peering over her shoulder, said, ‘Have you seen my father recently?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not for a while, I’m sorry.’

‘Ah well,’ he said, standing again, ‘you dodged that one,’ and left her. He went through the kitchen and out the garden door. In the damp midwinter chill he smoked a cigarette, then tossed the fag-end into the dark and went indoors and upstairs.

 

* * *

 

When Hal was a boy he boarded at Cothill House and spent his holidays in Herefordshire. Rarely he was granted the privilege of staying at the castle in Monmouth, which, being a castle, had been done up as a tourist spot sometime in the 1970s. He was almost never taken to London: the townhouse was for the person Henry was when he was not the father of six young children. If Hal did stay there it was for Wimbledon or the Ascot, a day or two only, and he was told in no uncertain terms that his place in the house was his bedroom, or if he wanted to play, the garden: Henry would come to see him if he wanted to see him.

Hal felt, opening the door to his father’s study, some remnant of a sense of transgression. Things were different now, Hal was the one who was not seen unless he wanted to be seen, but the bodily feelings of childhood stayed long after the logic. He had the intruder’s apprehension, the expectation of being turned away.

A banker’s lamp on the desk cast a green glow over the dark wood furniture, the dark wallpaper. In the mirror over the fireplace the reflection of the lamp glowed also. Henry sat behind the desk, which faced away from the fireplace and the mirror, so that Henry’s back was to the reflection of his back. Hal shut the door behind him and sat on the front edge of the desk, facing his father.

‘I’ve just been downstairs being very charming to your guests,’ said Hal. ‘I thought that was what you wanted me to do: come here and be good, if only to show you that I can be good, if I try, and if I happen to succeed. I do try….’

‘You don’t,’ said Henry, ‘you do what pleases you, it’s simply that sometimes it pleases you to do what I like. I’ve never once felt you were being good for the sake of it.’

Henry was not really saying it in the way he said things that were meant to make Hal ashamed. There was nothing bright in his eyes, he was in another time. From below came the muffled hum of music and conversation; it occurred to Hal that it was doubtful anyone at the party missed them.

‘I don’t know,’ said Hal.

Language, which for so long had been his armour and his weapon both, had stopped being either. He had reached the end of expression, of expressibility. _I will_ , he thought: that was not what he meant.

Henry stood. Hal thought he was going to leave; instead he put his hand on the side of Hal’s face. He looked at Hal as if searching for something, perhaps resemblance, and Hal, fearing what would happen if he found it, turned his head to press a kiss to Henry’s palm. Henry slid his hand into Hal’s hair and put his face in Hal’s neck, mouthing at the place where his collar met skin.

Once Henry had touched Hal there was no stopping it. Henry put his hand up the back of Hal’s shirt, feeling out the inwards curve of Hal’s spine as Hal slid forward. Hal got his thigh between Henry’s, his cock against Henry’s hip. They were both grievously hard, but when Hal reached for Henry’s flies his hand was pushed away: Henry couldn’t bear to get what he wanted. So Hal stopped being anything but selfish; he let himself slip forward until Henry was the only thing keeping him from toppling off the edge of the desk. He rubbed himself against Henry’s thigh till he ached from the chafe. There was pleasure, but also an itch he couldn’t relieve, an irritation that worsened as he indulged it. Beneath his jumper and his shirt his chest was dampening with sweat. He thought of scratching scabs into deeper wounds.

A movement in his periphery startled him: he realised, slowing, that it was himself and Henry in the mirror. In the low light he saw the smudge of his face over Henry’s shoulder. His cheeks were filled with a patchy red reminiscent of rosacea; there was red around his eyes too, so that at a distance he might have looked as if he were crying. His mouth was open, his jaw unlatched, his lips a little too full, as if he'd smeared lipstick on.

‘Hang on,’ said Hal, though it had mostly been him moving, and pulled his jumper over his head. The cotton Oxford underneath was wrinkled, stained in the center and under the arms with fresh sweat.

He leant back till he was lying on the desk, on top of swelling piles of paper having to do with everything that Henry owned; he flung his arm out to steady himself and knocked an old mug of tea to the carpet. With the other hand he tried to unbutton his shirt, and fumbled so badly that Henry unbuttoned it for him. Once the buttons were undone Henry bent down to press his face into the blonde hair at the center of Hal’s chest.

‘You don't,’ Henry was mumbling, ‘you don't see….’

‘I know I don't,’ said Hal dully, ‘I'm just a stupid overgrown boy who wants to take drugs and get fucked, and have my licence taken away for drink driving.’

‘—How I care for you,’ said Henry, half-sobbing.

‘Ah,’ said Hal. He had only got to tilt his head up a bit to see how Henry cared for him.

To put Henry off that turn of thought Hal seized his wrist and pushed it downwards. Henry took his meaning and undid Hal’s flies, pulling his cock free. Once Hal had made his noise of approval Henry tugged at him until, with a showy arching of his back that was more for Henry than for himself, he came, feeling even at the height of it the approaching desolation.

Lying back, his head tipped over one edge of the desk and his legs dangling off the other, he listened to his own parched, torturous breathing. He had come half onto his own stomach, half onto Henry’s hand; after some rustling he felt his stomach being wiped clean by a tissue.

 

* * *

 

His mother’s death Hal remembered in still images, as if there were a stack of picture-postcards he, at eight years old, had selected to send to the future. There was the frame of the doorway that opened up to the room where Mary was sitting in an armchair, holding Philippa; there was the blanket with elephants on; there was the ambulance coming up the long front drive of the Herefordshire house, the red lights reflecting in the fountain basin. The morning after, the flowers in the gardens: it was June, everything was in bloom. Absurdly, the Cornetto and Coca-Cola he had been allowed to have for breakfast while Nanny herded Tom, Humphrey, John and Blanche….

Hal remembered Richard’s decline in moments of motion. There had been, in the autumn of Hal’s fourth year at Eton, a weekend he went down to London without telling his father: he remembered the blur of damp brown he saw from the train window, the procession of Georgian facades from the back of a black cab, the walk down the corridor with the marbled floor and the mirrored walls; and at the end of it all, in the bed with the rich blue canopy, Richard, who looked like a rotting corpse with the beautiful face of an effigy. Edward Norwich, ever-constant, had kept Richard’s hair combed and parted in the center.

‘The body is the wheel,’ Richard had said. He was propped up by pillows; his hands, mottled with maroon lesions, were folded in his lap. ‘Time is the wheel turning. Once we leave ourselves everything is still. … What you must understand is that there is no fortune or misfortune, independent: movement simply. And we all do move, as if there were water beneath us.’

Richard had touched the underside of Hal’s chin, kissed the back of Hal’s hand, while Edward stood on the opposite side of the bed looking miserably on. Hal had wondered how Edward came to be so loyal, not realising until much later that it was not loyalty but a love so naive Edward had given up his self in exchange for Richard’s fidelity.

Just as Hal was going, Richard said, ‘Please, take something. It doesn’t matter what.’

By then he had sold or given away almost every object of material or sentimental value he owned. The house was as barren as if its occupants were already dead. After some deliberation Hal chose an antique gold teaspoon with a pearl inlay which, Richard explained, had been part of a wedding gift for him and Anne.

Startled, Hal said, ‘I’ll choose something else, then.’

‘No,’ said Richard, with a frightening severity that could not be sustained for longer than that single syllable, ‘you’ve chosen it, you must take it now. Ed,’—he reached out one hand—‘bring me the box….’

From a black lacquered box whose contents Hal could not see from where he stood Richard withdrew a pair of pearl earrings. The pearls themselves, large and a little irregular, like globules of spit, dangled from diamond studs that blinked as they shifted in Richard’s trembling palm.

‘Take these, too,’ said Richard, ‘these are the pearls that were her eyes,’ and laughed, knowing that he was dying and Hal and his father were not.

Hal took the train back to Eton with the spoon in his satchel and the earrings in his pocket. The former he used for tea, the latter he kept in an old mints tin in his desk. Some years later he had the earrings appraised and was told they might sell for ten thousand pounds at auction. Hal had laughed until the appraiser was cross with him; but he could not have explained what was funny about the fact that Richard had known he and his father would go to the grave having never been wholly loved, or wholly capable of asking to be loved.

 

* * *

 

Where, Hal thought, waking, had the teaspoon gone? The earrings he had put in a safe deposit box, supposing that if things got very dire he could always sell them to buy drugs, but he had kept the teaspoon with him through Eton and Oxford, usually stuck in a mug along with pens and stray cigarettes and novelty swizzle sticks. Had he taken it with him when he moved into the Fulham flat? He could have left it with the old Oxford things he had stored in his bedroom in Herefordshire. Or someone could have nicked it, or he could have inadvertently thrown it out. There was nothing to be done about it now. But he was awake, hideously: his head aching, his body aching, his heart palpitating, his mouth foul. It had been two or three hours since he had fallen asleep, and he felt as though he had just died of drowning.

His phone read ten past eight: early enough to get up and try to pretend he hadn’t been on a bit of a binge the night before. It was just that he didn’t think he could physically swing his legs over and put his feet on the floor without screaming. Knowing that it wasn’t what one was meant to do, that it would only make him feel worse in half an hour, Hal leant down to retrieve what was left of his eight-ball from the pile of clothes on the floor and did a key bump. He lay back just long enough for the blow to go up his sinuses, then got up to piss, brush his teeth, shower and shave, dressing himself afterwards in a pair of boxer-briefs only. Rather than put on more clothes to go outside, he smoked his first cigarette of the day out the bathroom window, his skin contracting in the cold wind. Something about the fresh air, the wind in his damp hair, made him feel glorious and wild. I am awake! he imagined himself shouting down into the garden, where the neighbour was walking his borzoi. In the bowl on the kitchen table there were fresh oranges! The body was just a wheel turning as water flowed beneath, and the world beyond it was unmoving.

The windows in Henry’s bedroom faced east. When Hal entered, shutting and locking the door behind him, the sun was half-above the roof of the townhouse across the street and the hot orange light slanted in geometrically, glowing on the wall opposite the windows. Henry was in bed, lying on his side with his hand tucked underneath his face. Hal sat in the armchair near the fireplace and watched his father come round, dampened by the pills he had taken the night before to sleep.

Sitting up, Henry said, his voice cracking, ‘I thought you might have gone by now.’

‘There’s a party I said I’d be at tonight,’ said Hal, ‘but there’s nothing to do between now and then.’

‘Have you slept?’

‘A little. I had a dream, actually— No, I won’t tell you, it wouldn’t make sense to you. And I’m starting to forget it now.’

‘Come here,’ said Henry, and Hal realised he was talking to him like a lover. If he had come to Henry’s rooms in Christ Church one Sunday morning in the early seventies he might have overheard Henry talking to Richard like that.

Rather than rise immediately Hal put a thumb in the waistband of his pants and pulled them down his thighs till he could kick them off. His nakedness then was that of a likeness of Hermes or Ares: one saw in it neither strength nor vulnerability but a sort of opacity, as if his body was an ad hoc impression of something that could not actually be seen. At this time of year he was pale, the brown left over from his summer sunburns had faded; the occasional moles, which by July were lost in sprays of freckles, were plainly visible. The blonde hair on his chest and calves, the darker hair between his legs, went bright gold when it caught the light. He needed, it occurred to him, to clip his toenails; and there was a bruise on the side of his left knee, dark purple, fairly fresh. Henry was looking at him. Hal stayed in the chair, stroking himself casually, till he saw Henry was hard, the line of his cock a distinct shadow in the blanket.

Perhaps Henry thought that he would be let go after Hal had satisfied himself; that the godly nakedness implied a godly _noli me tangere._  That was what Henry’s penitential nature required: being shown the thing at the root of his corruption and being told he would not be let at it.

Well, thought Hal, rising, approaching the bed: Henry would have to be let at it. Henry recoiled at the approach, but he did not say ‘you mustn’t think I want this’.

Hal drew back the blankets. He sat on the edge of the bed till Henry, with hands unconsciously shaking, did away with his pyjama set. His psoriasis was worse than it had been the past spring: from his knees the rash spread up his thighs and down his calves, likewise from his elbows down his forearms and up to his armpits. In some places he had scratched away the white crust so there was only the raw red, wounded-looking skin beneath. There was something obscurely compelling about it: Hal felt the childhood urge to pick scabs and eat them. Henry must have thought Hal was looking at him with disgust. But the flesh of one’s father was also one’s own, and Hal felt no disgust for himself.

‘You don’t have to do anything,’ said Hal, and stood on his knees with his legs on either side of Henry, Henry’s cock untouched and erect in the space between his thighs. He reached over Henry to the bottle of lotion on the nightstand and coated his hands with it, then with his hands, Henry’s cock.

Up to the last moment Henry looked as if he thought he had only to bite his lip and be still until the threat had passed. His terror at being faced with the inevitable appeared all at once in the few seconds it took for Hal to reach behind himself, hold Henry’s cock upright and sink down on it, his thighs shaking with the effort of lowering himself till his arse was flush up against Henry’s thighs. Hal bent his head back; the pain of having been penetrated was enough that he had to screw his face up, clench his teeth. He thought that after a few seconds the pain might abate; when it didn’t he started to move anyway, gracefully and with an awareness of how his body moved with Henry’s, as if he were riding a horse: not on a hunt, he didn’t think, but along a path in Hyde Park.

‘Don’t,’ said Henry, ‘you’re hurting yourself.’

‘But you’ve wanted this.’ God! For how many years had Henry had to pretend he was contented with rubbing Hal off and then kissing his forehead and going to another room? Now he had his cock in Hal’s arse and he was telling him he was hurting himself, knowing full well who had started it.

Henry said, ‘I haven’t.’

‘Do you want me to stop?’ asked Hal. He was beginning to figure out what was tolerable to his body, what hurt too badly, what began to please. He kept himself seated, moved forth and back rather than up and down; with one hand he gripped Henry’s shoulder, with the other he touched Henry’s face. Sweat was trickling, he saw, from beneath the sweep of hair over Henry’s forehead.

‘I want both things at once,’ said Henry.

Hal said, ‘I can only give you one or the other,’ and with his mouth hanging open, silent, he fucked himself with Henry’s cock, letting Henry lie limp and miserably twitching beneath him. He felt on the verge of coming for ten minutes before he did, and when he did, crushed his eyes shut, thinking of nothing but his own ecstatic body.

When he opened his eyes Hal saw his come streaked across Henry’s scabby chest and felt as if a joke he had enjoyed drawing out had all of a sudden gone too far but could not now be stopped. Henry wasn’t done: his desire if anything was fuller and less forgiving. He dragged his fingers through the come on his chest and wiped it off on Hal’s thigh, after which he got his hand on Hal’s hip and tipped him onto his back. That was how he fucked him then, with Hal’s legs drawn up and head hanging off the side of the bed, Henry on his knees between Hal’s thighs. Hal was aware that the bedsprings were creaking with each of Henry’s thrusts and hoped to God no one else was up.

Without preamble Henry withdrew. Hal thought Henry might have come, and had time only to think that he wasn’t ready for the ‘afterwards’ before Henry turned him onto his front, got him on his hands and knees and entered him again. Then Henry, fucking him with increasing viciousness, clutched a fistful of Hal’s hair and yanked his head back till his eyes watered.

‘Ow, ow, ow,’ Hal whispered, ‘let go, that hurts.’

‘I thought,’ said Henry, ‘it didn’t matter if it hurt,’ but let go of Hal’s hair and instead tipped his head back to kiss him, which made Hal miss the hair-pulling.

When Hal pulled away from the kiss Henry seemed to give up, finally, at pleasing him: he put one hand on Hal’s nape and one on the small of his back and fucked him as if he believed that with enough effort he could crack Hal open and crawl inside. The bedsprings were still creaking; beneath that noise Hal began to hear Henry’s short, half-stopped grunts, first quiet and slow, then quicker and louder. In the same rhythm Hal, finding no recourse in anything but his own brand of ludicrously unfunny farce, mouthed: _Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow._

For all that being fucked was increasingly intolerable Hal still wasn’t ready when Henry did come. Henry withdrew again; there were the slick sounds of him tossing himself off. He came on Hal’s arse and the dip of his lower back, crying out and choking back the crying-out. Once he had quite finished he flung himself against Hal and kissed Hal’s shoulders and neck: dryly, carefully, the way one might kiss a newborn. Having satisfied that impulse also, he sat back. Hal tumbled onto his side.

‘Hal,’ said Henry.

Probably Henry intended to plead for something or other; but as soon as he said it the nausea of the comedown struck straight at Hal’s diaphragm and he heaved, then vomited—not much, a mouthful of yellow bile—on Henry’s white quilt.   

‘Oh dear,’ Henry was saying, ‘oh no….’

Hal lifted his head just enough to say, ‘Why did you call me Hal?’

‘I'll get a glass of water….’

‘Really. You never call me Hal. You hate when other people do.’

‘I suppose it's what occurred to me to say,’ said Henry. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. … Please, let me—fetch a towel at least. You look so unwell.’

If Henry wanted Hal, Hal thought, he would get him: careless, bloviating, handsome in the way where the handsomeness falls apart up-close; above all magnificently, plainly insincere. He sprang up from the bed and said, ‘Absolutely not. I’m brilliant. Feel much better now I’ve had a bit of a yack; sorry it was on your quilt. Really I _can_ wash myself, I learnt how at least three years ago.’

Turning back to look at Henry, Hal saw him for the first time dispassionately, as if he were a stranger. Why please him? Hal wondered: this middle-aged man with grey in his eyebrows and at the sides of his head, this irrelevant remnant. Henry had accumulated so much: so much wealth, so many children, so many enemies, so many addresses to which he could send invitations; so much guilt, so many regrets, that wherever he went he was locked in an inner chamber of his own self, surrounded by rooms that did not belong to him but to the Henry, Duke of Lancaster that everyone else knew. Hal felt sorry for him in the way he felt sorry for everyone else, for Jack and Poins and the MP and Edward Norwich; but he did not feel responsible. He was tired, hungover, nauseated still, sore inside and out. He was thinking about the oranges in the kitchen, and the neighbour’s long-nosed dog.

 

* * *

 

After he had taken another shower and done another little bump (his last, he promised himself, until that night) Hal peeked into John’s bedroom and saw that, among half-empty bottles of soda and turned-out bags of crisps, Tom and John were lying asleep, Tom snoring in John’s bed and John on the sofa in front of the TV, which was playing a screensaver on loop. Hal crept in, turned the volume on the set as high as it would go, and put on a children’s cartoon, the sudden terrible noise of which flung his brothers out of bed, chirping curses to the effect that no one liked Hal, he was ugly, he was a wanker, he sucked cocks, he was a virgin, et cetera.

‘I’m literally,’ said Hal, ducking a sofa cushion swung at his head, ‘the only one of us who’s not a virgin, fuck off—’

‘Dons don’t count,’ said Tom, at the same time that John said, ‘Didn’t Blanche at one point sneak off with a boy from the comprehensive near the CLC?’

‘Eugh!’ cried Tom, ‘Blanche doesn’t snog, much less fuck—’

Hal slapped Tom on the back of the head and said, ‘Neither do you, tosser, now roll me a fag so I can go outside and smoke. Duty of Lancaster minor.’

Soon the three of them were sprawled on their backs on the crisply-mown grass of the communal garden, blowing smoke into the air above them. The trees were bare, the sky blue, the sun plainly visible. The cold was not the ordinary damp chill of London midwinter but a clean freeze reminiscent of a place much farther north. Despite that he had to squint to keep the sun out of his eyes, Hal shivered. The clothes he wore were things he’d dug out of the closet of his old bedroom, a moth-eaten jumper and trousers worn down at the seat; the breeze got in under the fabric and made him feel his skin.

‘It’s a bit sunny, isn’t it?’ said Tom.

‘It is a bit, isn’t it?’ said John. ‘It’s hurting my eyes….’

‘Fuck off, you hurt my eyes.’

‘With my brilliance? Really though, I’m like, seeing purple and everything. I think I’m going blind.’

‘Ugh! You sound like Dad. “Oh God, I’m blind, I can’t see— Um, false alarm, forgot to turn the lamp on in here actually, you can call 999 back and tell them I don’t need them after all…. What do you mean you didn’t call 999? Did you _want_ me to die? I can’t believe it, my own sons are just _waiting_ for me to die….”’

‘Yeah, but you look like Dad, which is worse.’

‘I do _not_.’

‘You will when you’re old….’

Once Tom and John had finished their cigarettes they retreated indoors, bitching about the cold and the sun and the hardness of the soil. Hal stayed behind, waving them away with his middle finger and mumbling that he would have another fag now that he was out. If it was a fine day in summer he might have fallen asleep, but as it was, he lit his second cigarette and scrolled through his phone looking for someone to talk to that wasn’t related to him. Near the end of his list of contacts a particular name seemed to present itself; he dialled the number.

After a few rings the person on the other end of the line picked up and gave a guarded ‘Hullo?’

‘Hi, Nell,’ said Hal.

‘Um, who’s this?’

‘It’s Hal—uh, Hal Lancaster?’

‘Oh,’ said Nell, ‘hi…. My brother’s been out for a few hours, I don’t know where—’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to know where Ed is,’ said Hal. ‘Actually I don’t want to know, and if you do see him don’t bother telling him I rang you, I’m seeing him tonight at the pub anyway. I wanted to talk to you.’

‘About what?’

‘Will you marry me?’ asked Hal.

‘Haha, wow, funny….’

‘No, really,’ said Hal. ‘I’m deadly serious, if I’d wanted to play a prank it would have been better than this. I mean I sometimes do go in for making people think I’m attracted to them when I’m not, but usually it’s more subtle, you know? And anyway I’m not trying to convince you that I’m attracted to you, just that I want to marry you. Probably you still think it’s a joke, that Ed has put me up to this and he’s here with me trying not to laugh loud enough for you to hear it, but he isn’t: I’m in the garden behind my father’s townhouse, and nobody else is here to overhear because it’s bloody cold out.’

‘Are you _high_?’ asked Nell, not in any sense humorously.

‘Not much; I mean I _have_ taken drugs, but just enough that I don’t feel like I’m dying, I feel quite sober actually. So, um, not to rush you or anything, but _will_ you marry me?’

‘—No?’

‘Think about it: you do realise that when my father died—and it won't be terribly long I don't think—you’d become the Duchess of Lancaster? Do you realise how few duchesses there are? Even Pippa Middleton settled for an investment banker or something. I won't pretend it wouldn't be difficult, I don't think anyone would like you awfully much, but you'd be richer than Croesus—d’you know who Croesus is? Well he was very wealthy…. You could buy as many clothes as you'd like, you would probably be on the cover of a magazine or two. And you would make a lot of Sloanes madly jealous of you, though of course the jealousy would express itself as extreme disapprobation so you would have to spend all your time with Euros, but it could be worse, you could marry a waiter or an actor. And you'd have your own bedroom, I wouldn't want to actually—’

‘Can you not? It's not like I don't know that you just say things, but can you say them somewhere else? Like, can you ask Ed to marry you? He’d probably say—’

There was some rustling on the other side of the line. Hal heard Nell say, muffled as if she had her hand over her mobile, ‘No, mum, it's fine. Yeah, seriously, it's fine. It's just one of Ed’s weird—’

Though the line went dead, Hal failed to notice immediately. He had glimpsed some slight movement in the window of Henry’s study: perhaps the curtains had been pulled half-shut, or half-open. He had been there last night; had the curtains been open or shut? When he closed his eyes he could only see the lamp, the mirror, the ceiling. He drew on his fag and found it had gone out, so lit it again.

 

* * *

 

It was Henry in the study; Hal found him there, in his pyjamas and dressing gown, no longer standing at the window but before the bookshelves, looking at the _objets d’art_ that had been placed between the books to fill space. He so rarely let the housekeeper in that everything had collected dust, nothing shone or glittered. The curtains, Hal noticed, had been pulled shut.

‘I saw you in the garden,’ said Henry.

‘Yeah,’ said Hal, ‘I saw you watching.’

‘Do you remember when you liked to play in the garden? You refused to play with anyone else; you acted out stories and did all the parts yourself, with all the different voices. I would watch from that window. When it was warm enough I opened it, so that I could hear your voice.’

Little made Hal more uncomfortable than the thought that Henry had once taken actual paternal pleasure in his boyhood. Hal recalled Henry having been the sort of father who minded very much about how his eldest son was turning out but felt no need to involve himself directly: he left the mothering to Mary, and after Mary was dead, to the housemasters’ wives at Hal’s prep school. Now he was confessing a fondness which more likely than not existed only in hindsight.

‘I don’t remember much about when I was small,’ said Hal. ‘It’s all just sort of been replaced with other things, Aristotelian physics and Uber etiquette and so on. I recall being decent at cricket? But that was at school.’

‘Did you want something?’ asked Henry. ‘Just now, I mean. I’m afraid I didn’t ask when you came in.’

Hal said, ‘What? Oh no not at all, I was going to tell you I was going.’

‘Oh yes I see,’ said Henry. ‘Well! Well….’

‘Yeah, there’s a party I’ve said I’d go to, so….’

‘Yes, I know. There rarely isn’t.’

‘Right. So—’

As Hal was turning to leave Henry took him by the shoulders, put him up against the bookshelf, and kissed him. There was a forceful gentleness about the kiss that acted as a tranquilizer; Hal’s eyes closed, his shoulders slumped, his impatience subsided. He would be let go eventually, he knew, so he leant back and let his mouth open against Henry’s mouth. It didn’t matter: Henry would die, and when he did Hal would be the only one who knew about what they did, and it would not mean anything more than his dreams did. Richard had understood how to make himself felt even after his death; Henry did not. The both of them, Henry and Hal, moved inwards, doubling in on themselves, overlapping each other, till there was only a fine bright point in the center of empty space—and later there would be nothing…. Hal put his hands on Henry’s waist and brought him closer, kissed him deeply, then released him. As a parting gesture Henry kissed Hal’s cheek.

Henry said, ‘I do sometimes miss you.’

‘You too,’ said Hal, but flatly, without real feeling behind it. He would believe it later, when he had cause: not now. He was impatient again, so wiped his mouth with his sleeve and went out, shutting the door behind him. For a moment he stayed in the corridor; through the shut door he heard the hush of the curtains in the study being drawn open again.

 

* * *

 

Hal had been wrong about one thing: he didn’t take a cab back to his flat. Directly he left the townhouse he decided he would rather die than talk and/or listen to a cabbie, even for the five minutes or so it would take for him to make it clear that he was vehemently uninterested in talking, so got on the tube at Green Park and took the Piccadilly line west. But when it came time to change to the District line, after which it was just two stations to Fulham Broadway, he diverted himself to the platform for the westbound trains instead. While he waited for the next train to arrive he rang Poins.

‘Hal,’ said Poins, ‘where the fuck were you last night? Did you get my texts? Couple of mates and I went to this like, rave, I guess? in Camden, it was fucking mad, I did molly for the first time in like six months, and then there was some bloke with acid, so I was like, out of my fucking head—and then there were these slags from Bristol who, like—’

‘Yah, yah, nice, nice…but I was at my dad’s actually? He decided to throw some bloody boring party and made John and Tom and I come, I don’t know how Humphrey got out of it…yeah, total waste. But I’m en route to the pub now; meet me there in thirty minutes?’

‘Barnet to Eastcheap’s forty-five minutes at best, mate. Let’s say an hour?’

‘Whatever, but you’re driving, right? Drop by Jack’s and see if he’s out of bed yet, drag him down to the pub with you. Make sure he brings his weed, he owes me one. Oops, here’s my train, catch you later; but when we meet up remind me to tell you about the conversation I had with your sister?’

Hal didn’t quite catch what Poins said as he was hanging up, but it sounded something like a particularly enraged ‘my _sister_?’ He was still laughing when the train doors closed, whereupon half of the car stared at him. Hal, far from being chastised, was only thankful that he hadn't had that conversation in earshot of a cabbie.

But it wasn’t long until the laughter died down. As the train began to move he grabbed hold of the overhead bar, looked down at his grubby moccasins and smiled privately until the smile died down also. At the next station several students got on and began talking loudly, and the passengers who had been staring at him stared at them instead. Hal kept his hold and swayed with the train, counting down the number of stations till Bank and Monument.

 

* * *

 


End file.
